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Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est la Même Chose

March 2008

As Choice approaches its forty-fifth year of continuous publication, it’s clear there have been many changes in the publishing environment since the first issue of the magazine appeared in March 1964.  Industry mergers, personal computers, the Internet, and the demise of the card catalog, to name a few, have all had their impact on Choice.  Technology, in particular, has nearly completely transformed the Choice production process.

Still, there is much continuity.  The magazine itself is still with us, albeit in somewhat altered and, we’d like to think, more contemporary form.  And so is Reviews on Cards, which made its debut in the fall of 1968.  And some things have changed very little.

Among these is the review process itself.  Today’s process employs a variety of technologies that were unknown in 1964, but the essence of that process is little changed from the one developed by the intrepid little band who founded Choice in the summer of 1963.

Today, as then, the first order of business is to ensure that we receive review copies of all relevant titles.  This is not the struggle it was at the outset, when Richard Gardner, Choice’s founding editor, had to personally visit publishers to persuade them to send review copies to his unknown startup journal.

Still, it remains a demanding process.  Even with those publishers who voluntarily send us copies of their entire output—university presses for the most part—there is a constant need to verify that all titles are in fact sent and received.  And for all the others, there is the constant need to stay abreast of their publication plans in order to request copies of relevant titles, which in turn means keeping up with today’s highly volatile publishing industry.

Intellectually, it’s not a terribly complicated process, but it is time-consuming, and the devil is in the details.  In the best of all possible worlds, no relevant titles would fall through the cracks.  Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, every year there are at least some titles that are not reviewed in Choice for the simple reason that we never receive a review copy.  While the number of these titles is relatively small, perfection remains an elusive goal.

Similarly, the rest of today’s editorial process would be instantly recognizable to the veterans of 1963-64.  The critical title selection decision is still made book in hand by a highly skilled editorial staff, all with an MLS or PhD.  Today, as in 1964, roughly 25 percent of the titles received are selected for review, and 75 percent are not.  Today, as then, Choice relies on an extensive pool of subject matter experts to write the actual reviews.  And today, as then, all reviews are carefully edited, fact checked, and copyedited before publication, a process requiring nearly as many hours of labor today as it did in 1964.

There are some things that can be streamlined, and others that can’t.  When it comes to the Choice editorial process, we’d like to think that today’s continuity with the past is evidence not of a failure to innovate, but of our implacable and continuing commitment to quality.—IER